Tanner 01: Rogue Agent

By Robin Flett

PORTAL
The Agency for Temporal Research operates a solar observatory in the distant past, providing valuable information about the sun's earlier history. But the unmanned observatory has shut down. Shielded, reinforced power lines have been found neatly cut apart.
With it's reputation at stake, the Agency sends Tanner to investigate.

RAIDERS OF THE SCROLLS
The Agency for Temporal Research has been asked for something a little 'unusual'. Scholars want them to save some scrolls from the ancient Library of Alexandria.
Dennis Tanner must raid the Library before it is burnt to the ground and the contents lost forever. Sounds like an easy mission for once - but he's been wrong before.

ROGUE AGENT
Stearman was a long-term colleague of Tanner's, but now he has disappeared in 10th century England. His mission has run to a stop and Stearman is nowhere to be found.
The past has its dangers, and more than one time traveller has disappeared without trace. Occasionally one has gone rogue, and then Tanner or one of the other field agents is dispatched to restore order to the timeline.
Is Alex Stearman lost, injured or dead ... or simply in hiding?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Robin Flett
• Release date: Jan 2, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215423653

Robin Flett

Robin Flett was born in Scotland more years ago than he cares to remember. Early retirement released him from the daily drudgery and sent him on the path to becoming an author. A rocky and painful path, as many will know!His first love has always been science fiction, but now he has embarked on new voyages with a contemporary thriller entitled The Purple Contract. Other projects are pending.Robin resides in northern Scotland with his two cats.

Book preview

cover.jpg

Copyright © 2023 Robin Flett

Smashwords Edition

The right of Robin Flett to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidences are either the product of the author’s imagination, or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

ROGUE AGENT

Robin Flett

Tanner Book 1

Portal

Raiders of the Scrolls

Rogue Agent

img1.jpg

Portal

Robin Flett

Tanner in the Cretaceous.

The Agency for Temporal Research operates a solar observatory in the distant past, providing valuable information about the sun's earlier history. But the unmanned observatory has shut down. Shielded, reinforced power lines have been found neatly cut apart.

With it's reputation at stake, the Agency sends Tanner to investigate.

Portal

The Portal irised open and I pushed my head gingerly through to have a look around. The first thing I did was look down.

Don’t laugh. Every now and then we lose someone who steps blithely through a badly-adjusted Portal. Just recently, Honor Thalsen did precisely that. Stepped clean off the edge of a cliff and fell four hundred feet!

Not very clever.

It was big Roger Howie and me who got the job of scraping her off the rocks, and it wasn’t pleasant. But it served her right. She should have looked first.

So I looked down; and around. Everything was fine, so I walked through, careful not to touch the rim of the temporal discontinuity. The rocks were warm under my feet; clean and dry. The breeze that drove across the broad summit of the mountain took the edge very pleasantly off the sun’s heat. The sky was nearly cloudless, and blue water sparkled far below in a most inviting way. I took a deep breath to clean the dusty, used air of the 22nd Century out of my valuable lungs and grinned in total satisfaction.

Dammit, this place even smelled good!

'Hey, Tanner! When you’ve finished your vacation, can we get back on the job?'

Moron.

I remember somebody saying he once saw Dawson smile – but he wouldn’t take a lie detector test …

So we sweated in the sun, hauling my equipment through and stacking it alongside the bland grey plastiform dome of the observatory.

Two days before, I’d been skiing. Joanne is much better at it than me, and has a twice-repaired collar bone to prove it. Some folk never learn. I would have called it a day after the first time, but she just laughs when I tell her that.

Then the company yelled for help.

Well, to be exact, MacPherson’s face appeared on the ‘phone screen and said, 'Tanner, get your ass back here tomorrow!' It’s what I like about my boss: his tact and diplomacy.

'Listen,' I said peevishly, 'I’m still on vacation until the end of the week—'

'You’re breaking my heart. You want to know the last time I had a vacation? I hardly know my kids,' he grunted morosely. 'My wife swears I’ve got a phobia about holidays, even though—'

'Have you?'

'What?' I’d broken his train of thought.

'The phobia.'

'Don’t be ridiculous Tanner,' he glared at me balefully. 'I pay you for troubleshooting the company’s projects, not psychiatry! Tell you what, you fix this one up and I’ll forget about the week you’ve already had.'

Santa Claus. But I was getting interested. They had never hauled me off vacation before, even when Adamson left a laser drill behind in 12BC and it wasn’t there when he went back for it. Somebody was getting panicky.

'Joanne isn’t going to like this,' I told him.

'Shit Tanner, buy her a new dress or something. Use your imagination.'

I thought about it. 'Those old witches in Accounts had better shut their eyes when they get this month’s expenses.' They would have the shirt off your back if you didn’t get a receipt in triplicate.

His face took on an interesting purple tinge, and the scowl got deeper. 'I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that—'

'This is a dreadful relay; you’re breaking up badly!'

The perfect image stared out at me for a moment, then I swear he almost smiled. 'Okay,' he grunted and the screen clicked off.

Who had just manipulated whom?

I was getting a bad feeling about this.

The map was already on the large crystal wall screen when I walked into his office. I had come up in the turbolift with Fiona Spencer, who was threatening to fall out of a sixteenth-century smock. She grinned at my look and said: 'I hear the old man’s stuck you with the Jurassic Observatory thing.'

'That’s not quite how I would put it—'

'Just watch yourself, Dennis. There are some nasty rumours flying about downstairs.'

'What rumours—?' But the door sighed open and she was gone.

Great!

MacPherson tapped the screen with a finger and said, 'This is the Cretaceous observatory site. It was installed to study the early solar system, but currently, it’s monitoring quasars in the Taurus sector.' He tapped the thing once more. 'We built it several years ago, real-time that is, and until recently we’ve had no trouble with it at all.' He was getting that lecturer’s intonation again, and I tried not to get bored.

'Mostly the place is unmanned, but from time to time we send a party back for a week or so for maintenance, or specific projects if they can come up with a good enough reason!'

His little joke. He meant if enough money changed bank accounts.

'So what’s the problem?' There had to be a problem: that’s why I was here instead of—

'Hmmm.' He sat down at his desk and put his feet up on a half-open drawer, tilting the chair back. I waited for the crash. The story goes that he once overbalanced and put his feet clean through the front panel of the desk.

'It’s like this: four times in the last three weeks, the cables from the solar power generator have been cut.'

'Cut!?' I had difficulty believing that. I didn’t have to be an electronics engineer to figure that there would be a lot of amps running through those cables.

He followed my thought